Andrew Huberman· PhD
what you're describing to me is something that many people listening will have experienced called REM sleep paralysis and it's not necessarily a problem or a sign of a condition that you need to be worried about although if it's happening frequently we can think about that what Norm happens when we wake up out of REM sleep and REM sleep as we spoke about in the first episode dominates the second half of the night and particularly the last quarter of the night as you're coming out of REM sleep and waking up out of REM sleep which you know you've got a 50 50% chance perhaps cu the other state that you're in a stage two light non REM as you're coming out of REM sleep you're regaining Consciousness to the external world and then normally in lock step with that perfect lock step if not a little before your brain is realizing this and it's releasing you from the paralysis and we all wake up and we don't even think about it I just wake up and I lean over I turn off you know the alarm and I get out of bed everything's fine every now and again however the waking up and Consciousness re-engaging occurs however the brain does not release you from the REM sleep paralysis so at that point it's almost like a locked in body phenomenon and it's very frightening because because you begin to be aware of your surroundings but you cannot make any voluntary movements because I told you that the voluntary sceletal muscle system is imper by the atonia the absence of muscle your involuntary you're still breathing and all but your eyelids turn out to be part of your voluntary muscle set so you can't lift up your eyelids and then normally what happens is that it's associated with a strong sense of often an in Rudder it seems to be if you're doing it sort of in bed by yourself at home now your context was a little different and it turns out that if you look at these descriptions of sleep paralysis where you can't wake up you can't shout out you can't move you have this sense of another presence or another being in the room it adequately explains most if not all alien abduction stories because when was the last time you saw a news article or on the news that someone said okay today it was very clear that Jimmy in Wisconsin in the middle of the day was abducted by aliens and everyone saw it you know you're at the meeting table and whoosh what happened that was Jimmy he just got whisked off by alien doesn't happen that way it's normally that you're in bed at night it's the early morning hours just before you're waking up these aliens came into the room they injected something into you they paralyzed you you couldn't shout you couldn't move it's simply REM sleep paralysis